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4. THE TRUE FRONTIER: CONFRONTING AND AVOIDING THE REALITIES OF SPACE IN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS

Though narratives of space travel characteristically resonate with historical and generic references—to pioneering and settling the American West (the Old Frontier), voyaging across vast oceans, diving deep underwater, or trekking into unknown polar regions—the fact remains that outer space is an environment radically different from all those that humans have previously explored. It is a realm without air, without water, and without material resources; a realm of zero gravity, extreme temperatures, and no protection from harmful radiation. A film about space travel, even if designed only to entertain, should in some way acknowledge these harsh realities; in the science fiction films of the last fifty years, I maintain, this has increasingly not occurred.

To distinguish films that confront the facts about space from films that avoid those facts, one can search for a simple but clear visual icon: the spacesuit. In both cinematic and actual space flights, these bulky, cumbersome costumes unmistakably signal that their wearers are in a dangerous and potentially lethal environment which demands an unprecedented degree of protection. Just as millennia of sea travel have not eliminated the need for lifeboats and life preservers, and just as a century of air travel has not eliminated the need for parachutes and emergency oxygen, anyone traveling through space will always need to have a spacesuit readily available, because all forms of defense one can imagine—force fields, tractor beams, photon torpedoes, strengthened hulls—will inevitably be susceptible to failure, and will inevitably fail someday, bringing travelers into contact with the deadly vacuum of space. A space film featuring spacesuits, whatever its other flaws, is realistic in at least one crucial respect; a space film that never displays or alludes to spacesuits, whatever its other virtues, is unrealistic in at least one crucial respect.

With space at a premium (in another sense), I cannot undertake a complete history of spacesuit films in relation to the larger set of space films, but a few important works can be named and discussed. Although there were space films before 1950, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), Woman in the Moon (1929), and the serials featuring Flash Gordon (1936, 1938, 1940) and Buck Rogers (1939), the first completely authentic spacesuit film was probably Destination Moon (1950), produced by George Pal and directed by Irving Pichel. While other critics have noted the film’s painstaking efforts to portray outer space accurately, employing black curtains and innovative lighting techniques to achieve a memorable effect, the film was equally attentive to the authenticity of its spacesuits; even Woody Woodpecker, in the film’s incongruous cartoon sequence explaining the principles of space flight, wears a realistic spacesuit during his flight to the Moon.

As it happens, the film’s co-author and technical advisor, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, was uniquely qualified to provide expert guidance in devising plausible spacesuits, since he had worked during World War II on the construction of “high-altitude pressure suits”;13 and he later wrote a novel, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), which incorporated a detailed and loving description of a functional spacesuit. In his essay “Shooting Destination Moon,” Heinlein described some of the film’s efforts to achieve realistic-looking spacesuits:

Low gravity and tremendous leaps [require] piano wire, of course—but did you ever try to wire a man who is wearing a spacesuit? The wires have to get inside that suit at several points, producing the effect a nail has on a tire, i.e., a man wearing a pressurized suit cannot be suspended on wires. So inflation of suits must be replaced by padding, at least during wired shots. But a padded suit doesn’t wrinkle the same way a pressurized suit does and the difference shows. Furthermore, the zippered openings for the wires can be seen. Still worse, if inflation is to be faked with padding, how are we to show them putting on their suits?... To get around the shortcomings of padded suits we worked in an “establishing scene” in which the suits were shown to be of two parts, an outer chafing suit and an inner pressure suit. This makes sense; deep-sea divers often use chafing suits over their pressure suits, particularly when working around coral....It is good engineering and we present this new wrinkle in spacesuits without apology.14

Now, reading about an “establishing scene” (albeit a very brief one) to explain the design of the film’s spacesuits, some will discern misguided priorities, agreeing with Phil Hardy that “the script is colourless and wooden; the dominant concern of those involved was to make the journey to the Moon realistic rather than dramatic.”15 Yet it is infelicitous to describe the difference between Destination Moon and other space films in terms of “realism” versus “drama,” since we are actually dealing with two different types of drama: the brilliantly predicted drama of actual space travel versus the conventional drama of popular film.

That is, applying normal standards, one could easily claim that there is no “drama” in Destination Moon: there are no villains to overcome, no tensions between protagonists, no thwarted romances or comic misunderstandings. Yet there is a strong and definite conflict in this story—the conflict between frail human beings and the merciless hostility of outer space—and the critical weapon that people need to oppose this enemy is a spacesuit. With space cast as the opponent, a scene describing the spacesuits that the heroes will wear might be regarded as both interesting and necessary, a scene precisely equivalent to the well-loved introductory scenes in the James Bond films in which Q displays and explains the ingenious devices that Bond will use to battle his next foe. Attentiveness to the correct appearance of the spacesuit is also essential, for the same reason that a cowboy in a western film cannot be seen brandishing a toy gun: a hero’s weapons must look credible.

In a film that devoted so much energy to its spacesuits, it is only appropriate that its final crisis involves a spacesuit: seeking to reduce the weight of the rocketship so it can return to Earth, the astronauts craft an ingenious scheme to jettison the last spacesuit without endangering the life of Sweeney (Dick Wesson), the crewman wearing it. They tell him to drill a hole in the airlock, attach the suit to a line through the hole attached to an oxygen tank, quickly remove the suit while the air slowly leaks out, return to the ship, and have the suit fall out of the ship once the airlock door is reopened. Even removing a spacesuit, then, in certain circumstances, proves beneficial to human survival in space.

If Destination Moon remains an underappreciated film, that might stem from the fact that, as Hardy notes, “for the most part its predictions were remarkably accurate” (125). Its depictions of slow-moving astronauts outside the ship resemble films of actual space walks; its scenes of men walking on the Moon, as others have pointed out, eerily anticipate television coverage of the Apollo missions; and even the improvisational, spit-and-chewing-gum inventiveness of their solution to the weight problem mirrors the actual way that astronauts and engineers on the ground devised answers to problems like those of the Apollo 13 mission. People rarely watch Destination Moon today not because it is undramatic, but because they have regularly watched real-life video footage which conveys the same sense of authentic drama.

For the next eighteen years, no other space film quite matched the stark intensity of Destination Moon’s confrontation with space, though some spacesuit films of that era had moments of evocative power. Project Moonbase (1953), the lesser film that Heinlein made without George Pal, offered innovative scenes of weightlessness in a space station and an accident on the Moon, while Conquest of Space (1955), the lesser film that Pal made without Heinlein, presented an unusually austere portrait of astronauts on Mars. Other reasonably realistic and dignified spacesuit films of that era include Ivan Tors’ Riders to the Stars (1954), the almost unknown 12 to the Moon (1960), and the television series Men into Space (1959-1960). Displaying some—but not enough—concern for safety, The Angry Red Planet (1960) places spacesuited Martian explorers in what look like motorcycle helmets with faceplates, protecting their skulls from dangerous collisions but offering unpersuasive protection from the harsh Martian environment. In the 1960s, there emerged films purportedly about the actual space program; these tended to be farcical at first, like Moon Pilot (1962) and The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), but later a few such films aspired to gritty realism, like Countdown (1968) and Marooned (1969).

However, the greatest spacesuit film of this period—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, the greatest science fiction film of all time—was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film took its subtitle seriously; 2001 is very much an odyssey within and through outer space, with co-creator Arthur C. Clarke, famed for his realistic science fiction, constantly on hand to ensure scientific accuracy. Our first glimpse of a person in the future, following the celebrated jump cut from bone to spaceship, is the sleeping Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester), wearing a spacesuit without a helmet, well prepared for any emergency during his flight to near-orbital space. Although Floyd’s stopover at the space station, with its comfortable chairs and Howard Johnson’s restaurant, may briefly give the impression that future space travel will be a safe and familiar experience, much like today’s air travel, subsequent events in the film decisively indicate that will not be the case, for Floyd is back in a full spacesuit for his spartan journey across the lunar surface to the unearthed monolith. A brief scene that usually provokes laughter—members of Floyd’s party form a group and pose for the camera in front of the monolith—conveys a serious message: space is an environment unlike that of Earth, and longstanding rituals and activities may no longer be appropriate or logical in this new environment. Here, it makes no sense to take a souvenir photograph to record someone’s visit to a noteworthy site when the person in the resulting photograph will appear entirely anonymous, virtually identical to all the other people wearing spacesuits. (The point was also made in Destination Moon when Sweeney, just photographed apparently holding up the Earth, complains, “Nobody will know it’s me in this diving suit.”16)

The film’s most significant spacesuit scene, of course, is the suspenseful episode when astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), leaving his spaceship in an unsuccessful effort to rescue fellow astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) drifting in space, is locked out by the rebellious computer HAL 9000 and forced to figure out how to get back into the spaceship before his power and oxygen run out. His plight stems from a critical lack of preparedness: hurrying to save his friend, Bowman neglected to put on his space helmet before piloting his tiny craft or “pod.” Drawing upon a vignette in his earlier story “The Other Side of the Sky” (1959), Clarke had Bowman come up with a startling solution: first, he opens a manual airlock; next, after positioning the pod by the airlock door, he opens the pod and exposes his body to the vacuum of space; then, since the rush of escaping air from the pod drives him into the airlock, he has a few seconds to reach and operate the manual control, closing the airlock and restoring oxygen to the chamber, before the exposure to space kills him. Thanks to his careful preparation, he manages to do exactly that; then, after finding and putting on a space helmet to guard against further threats, he proceeds to HAL’s memory chamber and methodically turns the machine off. While Sweeney briefly faced the same potential danger in the airlock of Destination Moon, Bowman’s chaotic moments in the airlock of 2001 represent the pinnacle of the spacesuit film, the only time on film when a human being comes into direct contact with outer space—and lives to tell the tale.

Considering this episode, and episodes in previous spacesuit films, we see that the environment of space radically alters several conventions of filmed narrative. A scene in space looks different: with an enveloping background of dark black space filled with sprinkles of white light, and foregrounded figures in white spacesuits (the usual color choice, despite the idiosyncratic bright colors of Destination Moon, since white best reflects heat), viewers essentially see a starkly black-and-white environment, even if the film is shot in color. A scene in space sounds different, since sound does not travel in space. Some films, like Project Moonbase, convey this by having no background noise whatsoever, a brief return to the silent film; in his space scenes, Kubrick provided only the sound of Bowman’s breathing—reminding viewers that, when you are deep in space, the only sound you will hear is the sound of your own breathing; and the scenes of Floyd on the moon, and Bowman flying near the final monolith, are backed by the ethereal, discordant vocal music of György Ligeti, suggesting an unfamiliar and alienating realm. A scene in space moves differently: for long periods of time, everything may proceed slowly and incrementally, as people in bulky spacesuits gingerly maneuver in an unforgiving environment; then there may be sudden dramatic movements lasting only a few seconds. Finally, for all these reasons, a scene in space often must be explained differently: either it must be preceded by expository scenes, so that viewers will understand later events, or it must be accompanied by narration, conversation, or interior monologues providing on-the-spot information. Here, Kubrick boldly assumed that the audience could figure out Bowman’s problem, and his risky solution, without any prefatory or concurrent explanation; in fact (though some hasty last-minute editing of the lengthy sequence may have been a factor too), many viewers to this day have trouble understanding this episode, which may be why it usually receives little critical attention.

After the success of 2001, one might have predicted a new wave of grim, meticulous spacesuit films; but Kubrick and Clarke were a hard act to follow. In fact, the most influential science fiction film of 1968 was Planet of the Apes, whose astronauts are never observed in spacesuits and quickly emerge from their spaceship onto the surface of an alien planet resembling southern California, eliminating all impediments to routine adventure. As for stories that focused more on space travel, it was not 2001 but another, different sort of celluloid space adventure that became Hollywood’s template of choice.

At the time when 2001 was released, a television series named Star Trek (1966-1969) was finishing its second year; and during two seasons of weekly journeys through interstellar space, a spacesuit of any kind had never been mentioned or presented. The crew of the starship Enterprise wore only normal clothing, and the women’s clothing was positively skimpy. Most of the time, they were comfortable inside their spacious craft, thanks to life support systems and artificial gravity; when they needed to leave, they entered a transporter room to instantly “beam down” to an earthlike planetary surface or into another spaceship. In rare circumstances when the transporter could not be used, crew members traveled through space in a small “shuttle craft”; however, even when they were looking through windows at space only a few feet away, it apparently never occurred to anyone to bring along some protective gear.

For the most part, then, the crew of the Enterprise experienced outer space only by watching it on television. To modern viewers, the ship’s bridge resembles a futuristic home entertainment center, with all chairs positioned to watch a huge television screen. Unaccountably lacking a remote control device, father-figure Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) must bark out orders to subordinates whenever he wants to change channels. The screen usually shows the space in front of the Enterprise, tiny stars moving from the center of the screen to its borders, a pattern now observed in a popular “screen saver” for computer monitors called “Starfield Simulator.” When necessary, Kirk can order the camera to zoom in for a close-up or recede for a long-range view. If he wants to speak with someone on another ship or a planet, he says “Screen on,” and space vanishes, to be replaced by a picture of a talking alien. In some situations, the screen can also display diagrams or video images from the computer library. For the people on board the Enterprise, quite literally, outer space is what you watch on television when nothing else is on.

When Star Trek eliminated space as a significant factor in its stories, there were several advantageous results. Certainly, life was simpler for the special effects people, since they did not have to worry about simulating zero gravity or filming actors in spacesuits; only models of spacecraft and planets had to be filmed against the background of space. More importantly, the peculiar and problematic aspects of space drama observed in previous spacesuit films were no longer present; scenes in Star Trek episodes could be filled with bright colors and evocative sounds, could be paced in conventional ways, and could be understood without annotation. In one key respect, the series famously ignored the facts of space, as Gene Roddenberry once explained:

A spaceship traveling through space, where there is no atmosphere, does not make a sound as it passes. When we did the original titles for the pilot, where we have the ship zoom past the camera at seemingly great speeds, we had no sound...just the visual movement of the ship. As a result, that sequence was literally dead. It had no feeling of speed or excitement about it at all. So we added a “swish” sound as the ship passed by, and suddenly it came alive. We are earthbound creatures, and we are used to some thing going that fast making a sound as it goes by. We had to put it in even though we know that scientifically it wouldn’t happen.17

With this concession to “earthbound” sensibilities, the producer was frankly falsifying the nature of space, making it seem more like Earth with those familiar “swish” sounds (which also accompany all spaceships in subsequent Star Trek series and films). It is a small matter, but it suggests a larger pattern of making space seem familiar and comfortable by ignoring its true features.

In one episode during the third season of Star Trek, however, spacesuits finally made a telling appearance. In “The Tholian Web” (1968), Captain Kirk and other crew members investigating a devastated spaceship must wear large, clumsy spacesuits when they are beamed aboard. Due to strange energy disturbances in the vicinity, Kirk is stranded on board the ship, which soon vanishes; as the crew gradually recognizes that there is no possibility of rescue, Kirk is officially pronounced dead, and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) takes over as captain. To those who have only seen this episode as part of an endlessly rerun syndication package, it is hard to convey the impact of this episode when I watched its first airing on November 15, 1968. Even as a teenager, I knew that regular characters were sometimes written out of series for various reasons; and, watching an episode in which Kirk is declared dead and Spock is competently settling into a new role as captain, I and all the others watching that night could not be sure, like later viewers, that it was all a trick. The emotional power of the episode was further heightened by a scene in which a quarreling Spock and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) watch a prerecorded video message from Kirk, who gently tells them that they must stop fighting and work together now that he is gone.

In the end, we do learn that it was all a trick; crew members start seeing fleeting images of Kirk in his spacesuit, flailing about, and after Spock deduces that Kirk is still alive, trapped in another dimension, he figures how to locate him and transport him back to the Enterprise—since the spacesuit kept him alive while he drifted through dimensional space. Still, I would argue that it is in this episode that death as a reality—as something that happens to people we know and like, not just villains, guest stars, and extras—first entered the universe of Star Trek, long before the more celebrated deaths of Spock (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [1982]), Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) (in “Skin of Evil” [1988], episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Kirk (in Star Trek: Generations [1994]). And the apparent death of Kirk occurred at the one time in the first series when someone was wearing a spacesuit—suggesting that the presence of spacesuits in space films can both signal and enforce attentiveness to the true dangers of space.

It is a sign of some fundamental blindness in the Star Trek family that the script’s co-author Judy Burns, recalling “The Tholian Web,” regarded the presence of spacesuits in the episode as a significant flaw; announcing that her original plan was to produce “a ghost story based on fact,” she explained:

Some of the things I was a little disappointed in were caused by technical problems. Originally there were no space suits when Kirk and the others beamed over to the other ship. There were force field belts which kept them encapsulated in a kind of mini-force field.... Therefore, Kirk would have wandered around the ship looking like he looks, except for a little force field belt. I think it would have made a better ghost story. He looks silly constantly appearing in that space suit. I really had a lot of qualms about that. Not from poor designing or anything, but from a story point-of-view, it would have been better.18

Stating a desire for “a better ghost story,” though, is also expressing a preference for a more conventional story. And does Kirk look “silly” in a spacesuit? At times, yes, just like any other real or fictional astronaut wearing one of those cumbersome suits to stay alive, clumsily trying to maneuver through zero gravity. People who really travel into space must be prepared to look silly, even if it offends Burns’a sense of decorum.

In any event, spacesuits have remained relatively rare in the universe of Star Trek; the only one that immediately comes to mind is the suit that Spock wears for a perilous rendezvous with the immense V’Ger ship in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). It is one of the most visually impressive scenes in that flawed film, as the tiny human figure reminds us again of the smallness and vulnerability of humans travelling through space—precisely the message that Star Trek otherwise endeavors to suppress.

The pattern set by Star Trek was generally followed by the other major science fiction franchise of our time—the Star Wars films—though these thankfully minimized the role of television screens and returned to the notion of spaceships with windows. Still, even within a few feet of space, no Star Wars character ever dons a spacesuit. As for the later Star Trek series, the only visible concessions to the environment of space are the large picture windows with scenes of space that are often observed in the background of crew quarters and meeting rooms; once a television channel, outer space now also functions as exotic wallpaper.

In the unlikely milieu of the film Superman II (1980), there occurs one striking moment of interaction between different styles of space films that in a way dramatizes the death of the realistic spacesuit film and the triumph of the unrealistic space film. Super-villains from the planet Krypton, flying through the vacuum of space without spacesuits in defiance of all scientific logic, encounter American astronauts on the Moon; the female villain casually rips one astronaut’s suit, causing his realistically-depicted death from exposure to vacuum. This provides a jarring touch of grim authenticity in a generally ridiculous film, an incongruous juxtaposition that illustrates the generic gap between space film and spacesuit film; and, as the villains abandon the dead astronauts to fly on to Earth to engage in epic battles with Superman, one gets the sense that this era of Star Wars, Superman (1978), and the revived Star Trek signaled the end of the true spacesuit film. Spacesuits would still figure in some serious movies, like the first Alien film (1979), and in some light-hearted ones, like the James Bond romp Moonraker (1979), but the spacesuit would no longer function as a generic marker that could impose an atmosphere of grim reality on space adventure films.

Now, given the other virtues of Star Trek, Star Wars, and similar films and television programs, it might seem petty and irrelevant to criticize them because they are insufficiently focused on the dangers and novelties of space travel; and to be sure, some scientific inaccuracy in science fiction film is far from unprecedented. But it is worth noting that films like these have prospered not only because they are aesthetically superior to the spacesuit films—though they usually are—but also because they are more conventional in all respects: films like Star Wars (1977) fit comfortably into any number of well-established literary patterns, though the same cannot be said of Destination Moon or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Further, a lack of realism in fiction does become an issue when the fiction begins to influence real-life decisions—which arguably happened in the case of Star Trek.

That is, during the 1970s, when support for the space program started to fade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration visibly sought new popularity by riding on the coattails of Star Trek. In response to a letter-writing campaign, the prototypical space shuttle was named the Enterprise; members of the Star Trek cast attended several NASA functions, including a well-photographed visit to NASA’s Enterprise; and Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols was recruited to make a promotional film designed to attract women and minority astronauts. All this was harmless enough, but it soon seemed that NASA was also embracing the Star Trek philosophy that space was a safe and comfortable environment, suitable not only for trained astronauts but for “ordinary citizens” as well—the idea that led directly to Christa McAuliffe and the 1986 Challenger disaster. To be sure, the causal chain from Roddenberry’s mini-skirted spacefarers in starships that go “swish” to Challenger exploding in the upper atmosphere is tenuous at best; still, it is at least an unsettling coincidence that the final flight of the Challenger had a seven-person crew whose visible and politically attractive diversity—including two women, an African-American, and an Asian-American—mirrored the diversity of the original seven-person cast of Star Trek. The universe of Star Trek might well provide attractive role models for an embryonic space program, but one should never forget that the actual universe is more strange and deadly than Roddenberry and his successors ever acknowledged.

Today, although America continues to maintain a doggedly conservative pace in human exploration of space, and although Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 (1994-1998), and all their cousins are still going strong, there nevertheless are signs of a possible revival of the spacesuit film. Some might be heartened by two major 1998 films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, which featured heroic astronauts in spacesuits engaged in desperately improvised missions to stop a large object from colliding with the Earth; but despite their scenes of implausible space heroics, these films retain an earthbound sensibility, terrified of space and entering that realm only to prevent a major disruption in our daily routines.

More noteworthy are the recent spacesuit films associated with the genre’s unlikely new hero, actor Tom Hanks. A lifetime devotee of the space program, Hanks was happy to appear as astronaut James Lovell in the big-budget film Apollo 13 (1995), which offered an authentic account of the most spectacular near-disaster during America’s lunar missions. Interestingly enough, one of the film’s most emotional moments, and one of its rare fictional touches, featured a spacesuit: swinging around the Moon in his dangerously crippled spacecraft, Lovell looks at the Moon and imagines himself standing on its surface, wearing a spacesuit, looking up at the Earth. Though spacesuits could not help the Apollo 13 astronauts, in life or on film, we again see a visual linkage between spacesuits and the grave dangers of space travel.

Immediately after Apollo 13, Hanks persuaded HBO to finance a major mini-series, co-written and co-directed by Hanks, recounting the entire saga of the first American space program, From the Earth to the Moon, which appeared to great acclaim in early 1998. Once again, as in 1950 and 1968, audiences eagerly watched films about men in bulky spacesuits awkwardly attempting to survive in a bizarre and harsh new environment. When asked by The Los Angeles Times why he launched this project, Hanks said he wanted to “show people what an amazing and cool thing it is to go up in space.” This was necessary, he continued, “Because in all honesty, that’s been lost.... We’re all awash in Capt. Kirk and Babylon 5 and Star Wars, in which the whole idea is reduced to essentially cowboys and Indians.”19 The contrast between what Hanks was doing, and what others had been doing, was recognized by the interviewer, who then explained: “In other words, Hanks didn’t want to do a thriller or a creepy sci-fi epic; rather, he wanted to film space history, and in so doing bolster a genre that has one benchmark work (Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a host of other films that played fast and loose with the facts of space travel” (92). On the day that I first drafted this essay, it was eerily appropriate to stumble upon such overt support for my developing argument.

One more issue must be addressed: in mentioning Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon, I have in a sense gone beyond the boundaries of my announced subject, “science fiction films.” After all, how can films about events that really happened, accurately related, qualify as science fiction films? Yet in placing them in this context, I am hardly alone: Apollo 13 was nominated for the science fiction Hugo Award as “Best Dramatic Presentation,” and television coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing actually won the Hugo Award in 1969. And other fact-based space films like Return to Earth (1976), based on Buzz Aldrin’s autobiography, and The Right Stuff (1983), based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury astronauts, are regularly linked to science fiction film. While this might be only an atavistic response, a lingering feeling that all films about space must be “science fiction,” I suggest that other factors are at work here.

That is, since space is such an unprecedented and outlandish environment, it may continue to seem like science fiction, even when over a hundred people have traveled into space and recorded their exploits in words and on film. The problem is that many people may resist believing, at some level of their consciousness, that this strange realm is actually what travelers report it to be, preferring to believe that it is really similar to Earth, that it will serve as a colorful new playground for stories about cowboy and Indians, or cops and robbers. The films that cater to this illusion, the space films, may be better regarded as fantasies; the films that seek to counter this illusion by depicting space as it truly is, the spacesuit films, are science fiction precisely because the truths they present are still not widely accepted.

Before World War II, science fiction predicted the atomic bomb, but after two of them were detonated with catastrophic results, stories about atomic bombs were no longer viewed as science fiction; everybody now believed in the atomic bomb. Science fiction also predicted space travel, which has been regularly occurring for nearly forty years, yet stories about space travel continue to be regarded as science fiction because people still do not really believe what space is truly like. And so, as long as people can listen to the dramatic “swish” of the Enterprise without protesting, as long as they imagine that Star Trek and similar programs represent a plausible future for humanity, there will remain a need for true science fiction stories to remind them of the ominous silence, and lethal power, of outer space.

13. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14.

14. Robert A. Heinlein, “Shooting Destination Moon,” 1950, Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, edited by Yoji Kondo (New York: Tor Books, 1992), 120.

15. Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, 1984 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Woodbury Press, 1986), 125. Later quotations in the text are to this edition.

16. Destination Moon (George Pal, 1950).

17. Gene Roddenberry, cited in Stephen Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 116, ellipsis Roddenberry. The book was actually written by Whitfield, with occasional inserted comments from Roddenberry.

18. Judy Burns, cited in Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages (Boston and New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995), 72.

19. Tom Hanks, cited in Paul Brownfield, “Fly Him to the Moon” [interview with Tom Hanks], The Los Angeles Times, Sunday Calendar Section, April 5, 1998, 92. Later page references in the text are to this edition.